Free Press Staff Writer

Reeve Lindbergh at home in St. Johnsbury. / RYAN MERCER/Free Press

HARRY BLISS/for the FREE PRESS

The popular performance franchise called “The Moth” rounds up storytellers, from novices to experts, who deliver true and personal 10-minute stand-up presentations billed as “live and without notes.”

That doesn’t mean these presentations are raw or spontaneous, though. The stories can go through plenty of rehearsing and massaging and fine-tuning before they’re allowed to emerge “alive and without notes.”

Just ask Burlington cartoonist Harry Bliss.

Bliss wound up developing two stories in anticipation of an appearance in The Moth Mainstage, scheduled for Sept. 7 at the Flynn Center. As it turns out, he won’t be telling either one on stage that night. Instead, he has a third story to tell his friends — about his experience of trying to develop a Moth story — and, for him, it’s not a happy one.

The irony is that Bliss had been impressed by some of The Moth stories he’d heard on the radio. It wasn’t his idea to be a Moth storyteller, however. He was invited by a Moth recruiter who heard him speak about work he’d done for The New Yorker.

Bliss was interested in participating. He spent about 10 hours writing, rehearsing and revising a story from his childhood that he thought would work well. Then he was coaxed by a Moth producer in New York to develop a second, darker story from his childhood that was personally painful but apparently better suited to Moth’s theme for the Flynn show, “Walk the Line.”

He spent seven or eight hours on that one, recording it and getting advice by email on how to shape it and what scenes or moments needed detail or elaboration.

“I had no idea so much preparation was going into one of these off-the-cuff stories,” Bliss said.

Behind-the-scenes confusion

The Sept. 7 event will be the second appearance of The Moth Mainstage at the Flynn Center; the first was in October 2011. It’s a benefit for Vermont Public Television, and it will feature five storytellers, two of whom will be local.

The run-up to that main event created some confusion about who those local storytellers would be.

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A preview reception for Moth Mainstage sponsors and friends, held July 27 at the Hotel Vermont, featured stories told by Anna Post of the Emily Post Institute, and by Bliss, who recounted his story No. 2. So it seemed reasonable to assume that Post and Bliss would be the local performers at the Flynn.

That’s what Vermont Public Radio thought, anyway. VPR, which broadcasts “The Moth Radio Hour” on Saturday afternoons, is a sponsor of the Flynn event. VPR’s on-air promo for The Moth Mainstage promised “true stories told live without notes, props or accompaniment” and identified Bliss and Post as two of the performers.

The casting decision for the Sept. 7 Burlington performance is made in the Moth’s New York office, which was unaware of the VPR promos, according to Maggie Cino, a senior producer. The actual cast was announced Aug. 20, and it included neither Bliss nor Post. That might have come as a surprise to VPR, and its listeners, and everyone who’d bought tickets in advance expecting to hear them — but not to Bliss and Post. They already knew they were out of the running.

In Bliss’ case, as he tells it, there was some disagreement about which story he would tell. He preferred the first, but Moth wanted the second and thought it needed more work. Post acknowledged by email she was out of the lineup, but she did not respond to a follow-up query.

The outcome bemused Bliss and left him feeling “manipulated” and “used.” He’d assumed in the beginning that his participation was a done deal.

“If I’d felt that I was auditioning,” he said, “I would never have done it.”

Curated and rehearsed

The two local storytellers Moth wound up choosing are both well-known figures here: Mark Redmond, executive director of Spectrum, and author Reeve Lindbergh.

Both are fairly new to The Moth process. They have no complaints about it and haven’t invested a lot of time, at least so far.

They came to The Moth in different ways. Redmond volunteered, sort of: The Moth’s website invites one-minute telephone spiels from would-be Moth storytellers. About nine months ago, Redmond said, he dialed the number, gave his bit and forgot about it. A few weeks ago, he got a follow-up email. He told his story over the phone and was told that The Moth liked it. He was thrilled, he said recently.

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“I love The Moth,” Redmond said. “I’ve listened to it for years.”

There have been phone calls back in forth to and from New York, minor changes suggested. “Not a heck of a lot” of work, Redmond said.

Lindbergh was recruited. When she was first asked, she said she thought: “I think you’ve got the wrong person.”

Lindbergh is used to writing stories, not telling them in front of an audience. Her initial thought was: “There’s no way on Earth I could do it.”

She came around to the idea after a couple of phone conversations with a Moth staffer. She’ll be telling a story about her family based on something she’d already written. She has told the story a couple of times, and has received suggestions. Some things about it she’s going keep the same, but she agrees that “I need to work out something in the middle.”

“I want to rehearse,” she said.

With all the rehearsing, editing and coaching that goes into these stories, Cino was asked, isn’t The Moth’s self-description, “live and without notes,” a bit misleading?

Cino, the producer, said she has been clear, in interviews she has done about The Moth, that “we do work very directly and in a very focused way with the storytellers” to help “shape the material.”

“We’re very upfront about that,” she said. The stories, she said, are “curated” but not memorized.

The Moth’s website has a section called “What is The Moth?” that does include this sentence: “At the center of each performance is, of course, the story — and The Moth’s directors work with each storyteller to find, shape and present it.”

The blurb goes on:

“Since its launch in 1997, The Moth has presented thousands of stories, told live and without notes, to standing-room-only crowds worldwide.”

One thing missing from the description is all that rehearsing.

“If you’re acting Shakespeare,” Lindbergh said, “ you do it live and without notes.”

Most Shakespeare productions, however, don’t make “live and without notes” part of their promotional pitch.